


Stories Darkness Tells You

by thuvia ptarth (thuviaptarth)



Category: Fray
Genre: Incest, Multi, Yuletide, recipient:Marks, yuletide2006
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-24
Updated: 2006-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-03 13:41:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thuviaptarth/pseuds/thuvia%20ptarth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time there was a boy who was afraid of the dark and a girl who wasn't afraid of anything.  But that was long ago and far away, and neither of them lived happily ever after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stories Darkness Tells You

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by Oyce and Yoon.

Do you miss me, Mel? Come on. Tell me true. You miss me every day. Dawn stabs through the grime-smudged window and you wake up and you think about me; you think about me and you want to die. You roll out of bed and you do thirty push-ups on the floor, forty pull-ups on a pipe that runs across the ventilation shaft, and each time you inhale, you think my name; each time you exhale, you tell yourself I'm dead. When your lungs burn, when your ribs ache, when you feel the coming of the storm by the healed hairline cracks in your bones, you tell yourself I'm dead and you've got to do it for me; you've got to keep going, you've got to keep pushing, you've got to get good enough to kill me all the way dead.

I know, because I know you, I know all of you, the girl, the girls; and I know you never will push yourself that hard, get that good, because you never could. You never were that good. Never, Mel. You never were that fast and you never were that good; you just could recover from mistakes that would have left other people dead. Slayer healing's convenient that way--well, most of the time. It's less convenient when you _want_ to die. There are so many ways to make a girl want to die. Oh, the stories I could tell you ...

They'd give you nightmares, the stories I could tell.

*

Once upon a time, in the depths of a city, there lived a family of greengrocers. It was always dark in those depths, and always light: the sun seldom reached down that far, but the artificial lights never went out. The grocer and her husband worked long hours, because their store kept the same hours as the lights; their children helped sometimes, when they weren't in school, and when they weren't helping, they played in the family apartment two floors above, the twins in the care of the eldest daughter.

It was the girl twin who heard the alarm first, who raced ahead of the other two, who discovered the bloody bodies on the floor.

It was the eldest who spoke to the police, who struggled to keep the grocery going, who made deals with the gangs for insurance and saw the store repossessed by the bank anyway; it was the eldest who found a job or two or four waitressing, to keep body and soul together, to keep the twins in school as long as she could. It was a while before she realized what the girl twin was up to (do you remember this part of the story, Mel?), because as late as the younger sister came in, the eldest often came in later still. Often, but not always. Sometimes the eldest would wait up for her younger sister, chain-smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table, tiredness slowly drawing the future's lines down her face. (I never knew how you could bear to meet Erin's eyes, those nights. I couldn't. I couldn't look her in the eye when I said I didn't know where you were, and it was just as hard when I was telling the truth as it was when I was lying.)

*

She'd yell at me, you know. Want to know why I couldn't keep you in, couldn't stop you from risking your neck on some stupid grab, couldn't pound some sense into your head ... It was the same kind of stuff she'd yell at you, only I'd never yell back, not even to say _she_ was the one introduced you to Kreb in the first place. That's what she was thinking, you know, deep down, that it was her fault for buying insurance from Kreb's gang, that _that_ was what started it all. That was why she hated you so much when you got me killed. Deep down in the warren of her head, she thought it was all her fault.

Her pain wasn't as delicious as yours, but no point in passing up candy when free samples are passed out, right? Don't be jealous. Erin's just a three-coi bar, the kind our parents used to sell at the register marked up to four-coi-and-a-half. You, you're like that good stuff you stole once from a party in the uppers just for kicks: so sweet and rich I could drown in the taste. Slayers are all like that, more or less, but you're more, not less, Mel, because you're you, Mel, because I love you so much. So I'll tell you what I never told Erin, when I watched her raze and burn every patch of ground in her heart that belonged to you, these past four years: It wasn't Erin who got me killed. It was you.

It always would have been you, no matter what. Lurks, demons, werewolves, bads big and little, they always come to slayers. They can smell it, even the degenerates in Haddyn's alleys: they can smell something delicious, something powerful, something _alluring,_ even when they don't realize that's what's happening, even if they don't know what they're tasting till they've got a mouthful of your blood, a clawful of your skin, a swallow of the feast that's your death.

Icarus, up on that roof, he grabbed you instead of me; he grabbed you first, and not because you were closest. He only took me because you were so eager to see me get away. Lurks like playing with their food, you know--or you don't know, because you don't have the dreams to tell you; but you'll figure it out soon enough. So Icarus, he threw you away because he wanted us both to suffer more, he wanted you to reach for me and me to reach for you; probably any lurk would have done that, and Icarus, he had good instincts. I'm gonna miss him. I'm gonna have to take his death-price out of Erin's hide. She can die before you. You remember what a good boy I always was. I never ate dessert first.

Icarus's good instincts, that's what had him up on the rooftop, waiting for a slayer to run by. And if it hadn't been him, it would have been something else: a lurk, a were, a spirit, a demon, oh, there are so _many_ of us, Mel, so many of us it could have been; you'll see. If it hadn't been Icarus, it would have been someone else you lured by. You were your brother's death from the moment you were born.

*

Once upon a time there was a boy who was afraid of the dark. He hadn't always been so fearful, though he had always been a quiet child, inclined to sit and read and daydream when his twin sister was inclined to run and shout and play. They had always loved each other very much, despite their differences; sometimes, for that love, the boy would play tag or cops-and-robbers or air-cab, and sometimes, for that love, the girl would slump flat on the floor, listening without protest when her brother read his favorite stories aloud. Their father would laugh whenever they quarreled about what to do. "You're such opposites!" he'd say. "I always thought twins should be alike."

"We _are_ alike," the girl would say.

"We're two halves of the same person," the boy would say, and though no one else agreed, the twins knew it was true. When they were very small, they slept in the same bed and dreamed the same dreams; this stopped when they grew big, when the girl began to acquire curves and the boy began to get his height, when the girl began to run with dangerous men and the boy began to dream true.

It was the dreams that changed everything. They were the first secret the boy had ever kept from his sister, and he was surprised at how easy it was. He wondered if, behind her bright brash smile, his sister kept secrets from him, too.

What did the boy dream of? He dreamed of the dark, of course. He dreamed of all the monsters hiding in it, refugees from fairy tales and bogey stories, the kind of stories his father used to tell them when they slept in the same bed, stories that were only scary until his father laughed. His father was dead now, and there was no one to laugh.

The boy dreamed of endless caverns underground, thick with the smell of blood; he dreamed of a mountain of corpses, a copper brazier on a bed of coals, the ugly angle of a child's broken neck. He dreamed of the opening of the gates of hell; of a mouth so huge it could swallow the world. He dreamed of pale shapes lurking in the darkness, strange beasts who wore human skins but who no longer had human eyes or human hearts or human faces; he dreamed that one of these beasts would kill him.

It was the dreams that made the boy afraid of the dark. He was a sensible boy, for all his fondness for stories, so he got himself a night light and didn't go out too late at night and told himself that there was no reason to tell anyone about his nightmares; and so he never spoke of them, not till the day he died.

After he died, he mentioned them to a couple of people, but you already know about that.

*

The moral of this story is: Trust your dreams. Someday they may come true.

*

Are you dreaming now, Mel? Are you dreaming sweet dreams of triumph? You saved the world, reconciled with your sister, won the war even if you lost a friend or two: not bad for your first outing. Or do you have nightmares, now that you know enough to be afraid of the dark?

You don't look like you do. Most of the nights when I creep near enough to watch you sleep, you look so peaceful. I can hear the steadiness of your pulse, see the stillness of your eyes beneath their closed lids. I love the times that's not true, the times you toss and turn and I can smell the fear in your sweat, the times you make tiny frightened sounds in your throat, the times you wake yourself shouting. You don't do that enough, Mel. I'll help you do it more. I dream about it, and you know my dreams come true.

*

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved his sister very much. Every night he dreamed of how much he loved her and how much he hated her; every night in his dreams he fucked her and wanted to fuck her, killed her and wanted to kill her. Every night in his dreams she killed him, over and over and over again. Sometimes she killed him because he was a monster, but sometimes--most of the time--he was a girl, a strong and clever girl, and she was the monster, who was stronger and more clever yet.

He dreamed the words for _please_ and _love_ and _mother_ in languages no one had spoken for a thousand years, and he dreamed of cities and forests and continents whose names no one had remembered for thousands more. He dreamed what I told him, Melaka Fray, and he dreams what I tell him now: He dreams of powers born outside of time, who ruled this plane once and will rule it again; he dreams of beasts who can swallow the sun and witches who can crack open the earth and gods who can bring back the every-time no-time eternal everywhere that will kill every human being in this world and every human being in many more. He dreams of your blood, Melaka Fray, your mouth, your skin, your cunt, your kiss; he dreams of loving you and killing you and making you the dark queen who shares his throne.

He dreams what I whisper in his ear, I who have known gods and demons and slayers and wizards and priests; I who was there before the darkness and the light; I who once ruled this world, whose breath was terror and whose glance was death. I was here before you, Melaka Fray, before any of you, before fools trapped a fragment of my power and bound it to the first slayer's bones, before the first lurk woke in its grave and discovered it hungered for human blood. I know your brother's memories and sometimes when you think you're dreaming of him, it's me who's smiling at you with your brother's mouth and speaking to you in your brother's voice. I know all the dreams slayers once dreamed and I know the last words each one spoke before she died. I walk, I talk, I'm the fire in the dry grass when there's no hope for rain. I'm the reason you breathe and the reason you fight and the reason the first slayer was ever made; and I'm waiting for you, Melaka Fray, across the abyss that separates your world from hell, and one day soon I'll come for you; over a bridge of bones and sea of blood, for you and everything you love I'll come.


End file.
